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Post by amyinowasso on May 31, 2023 12:43:02 GMT -6
It's been out of stock for 2 years. Some problem with manufacturing.
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Post by Tucson Grower on May 31, 2023 13:17:57 GMT -6
Rats.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 14, 2023 10:52:23 GMT -6
I've sprayed every combination of pesticides I can think of this year; Sevin, Malathion, Permethrin, Sayonara, Pyrethrin, you name it. And at a great cost in materials, wasted time, and energy. Nothing kills grasshoppers when they come in swarms by the millions the way they have for the past two seasons. Even if you do manage to kill them in one spot, another swarm just drifts in to take their place.
I covered all of my cabbage and broccoli with row covers, weighted all along every edge, only to find that thousands of grasshoppers still manage to find a way inside. Who knows how many seedlings I've lost to grasshoppers this year? I've come very close to just calling it quits more than once.
These are my weighted row covers. It rained last night and all the row covers managed to do was shelter the grasshoppers inside from the pouring rain.
This is a closeup of what it looked like inside the row covers this morning. Grasshoppers by the thousands!
This is what my cabbage looks like. The black dots are grasshopper Fras.
On a brighter note, I did get my deer fence finished and have not had a single deer enter my garden since earlier in the season, before the fence was in place, when they just came in to walk on my newly laid plastic.
I've also got my drip irrigation finished up and running, so now I can water my seedlings. But as you can see, by zooming in beside my row cover photo, the seedlings ain't doin' so great ...
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Post by macmex on Jun 14, 2023 13:24:30 GMT -6
That's really rough, Ron.
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Post by Tucson Grower on Jun 14, 2023 16:13:31 GMT -6
That really stinks. Those guys with the Nosema locustae disease spreading bait, need to get it together. If it were actually available, it might work to give us a better edge on controlling these insidious creatures. I have so few of them compared to Ron; its hard to imagine enduring the level Ron has to deal with. I'm sure glad Ron can find his way to persevere in such challenging circumstances.
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Post by rdback on Jun 15, 2023 7:28:24 GMT -6
heavyhitterokra, oh no, not again, Ron! I sure hate reading and seeing this....again. I'm shocked they were able to defeat the row cover. A few maybe, but not the mass that's in there. How do you think they did that? Do they dig under?
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 15, 2023 15:54:08 GMT -6
Rdback,
My garden is a seething mass of grasshoppers. It's really kind of hard to imagine the numbers. What you see under the row cover is but a fraction of what was on top of the row cover when I arrived. They just crawl all around it until a few of them eventually find their way through the creases and folds or between leaves, or whatever until they get inside.
In years past, I've had ripe tomatoes, cleft in two by grasshoppers during the night that fell off on top of my plasticulture. The grasshoppers were so numerous there that they ate right through the plasticulture while lapping up the tomato's juices, leaving a hole in the plastic about the size of a donut. I've seen them strip 20' foot apple trees to the bare branches overnight, leaving nothing but little green apples still hanging in place.
One year, they ate all of my ripe peaches off the trees, leaving the bare seeds hanging by the stems. In 2012 they ate the bark off of my fruit trees, killing all but 6 of the 50 apple trees I had planted. Once they eat everything to the ground, they start eating each other, once the ground is bare, they just move on.
The crazy thing this year, is that they are not everywhere. They are just in clusters of a few hundred thousand, spread here, there, and yonder, wherever a mass of them happened to hatch out. I've seen them way worse in years past.
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Post by amyinowasso on Jun 25, 2023 6:03:10 GMT -6
Facebookers are complaining about grasshoppers and they prompted me to find a quote from Dawn. "Oh, and here's my favorite tip for killing unwanted grasshoppers and June bugs---put a few handfuls of dry molasses in a 5-gallon bucket of water. Set it on the ground near an outdoor light that remains on overnight. In the mornings you'll find it full of June bugs and, in season, grasshoppers. I guess they are attracted to the sweetness of the molasses and drown in the bucket. Skim off the dead bugs onto the ground, and you'll be able to use the bucket indefinitely. I've done the same thing in the past with alfalfa tea and compost tea. The buckets of tea won't kill all the June bugs or grasshoppers, but you'll be amazed at home many find their way into that molasses tea daily. I tried to replicate this in the garden itself by putting quart canning jars filled with molasses tea in the garden and it didn't attract grasshoppers in the same way."
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 3, 2023 9:52:35 GMT -6
I finally went out this morning to get some photos of the damage done to my garden this summer by grasshoppers. I only got one head of cabbage and one cutting of broccoli before the grasshoppers destroyed all of my plants. I lost 50 heads of cabbage, all of my cucumbers, squash, peppers, corn, onions, tomatoes, and beans this year.
So far, all that's left standing is okra and Roselle. I've lost all but 4 rows of the 12 rows of okra I had planted. Sometimes, it sounds like popcorn popping from all of the grasshoppers jumping against the steel doors of our house during the days. If you zoom in on this photo, you can see the okra growing right beside this cabbage and how much the grasshoppers prefer the cabbage. They cause great stress to my okra, but they don't usually kill the bigger plants. Although they definitely will destroy any seedlings. I've lost countless seedlings this year. Need a good gardener's Halloween photo? These are the 'skeletons' of my cabbage patch.Another skeleton for the gardener's spookhouse.Talk about spooks, this is my broccoli patch. A few weeks ago, it was green and lush and producing like crazy. Now, it's almost completely gone, due to grasshopper depredation. If you zoom in on this photo you can see all of the bare holes in my plastic, where grasshoppers destroyed the seedling okra plants before they got 6" inches tall. My garden is usually not this weedy, but I've pretty much given up on taking any care of it this year because of the constant carnage.This is all I have left of my pepper plants. These used to be healthy, happy, Chili Rayado plants until the grasshoppers stripped them as bare as sticks.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 3, 2023 14:05:09 GMT -6
This is a very interesting video (until near the end, at the 5:09 minute mark where it turns into a commercial for locust pins and stickers). Mainly, it's a video about how some grasshopper species can turn into locusts.
I'm still not sure which these are, grasshoppers or locusts, (I'm told that there have been no locust in North America since they went extinct in 1902), but these definitely came here in swarms last year, starting on July 20th, stripping 20' foot tall, mature, apple trees bare of all vegetation within 3 days of their arrival. This year, they were hatched in place, so they began showing up as soon as it got warm enough for them to hatch out. There are probably at least a dozen different varieties of grasshoppers hopping and flying around here, from green, to yellow, to brown, to black with blue or orange stripes.
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Post by Tucson Grower on Jul 3, 2023 15:48:24 GMT -6
heavyhitterokra, Your story is very scary. It could happen to any of us.
Compared to you, I have very few grasshoppers. Even the relatively few that I have can do an incredible amount of damage. It's easy to see why you are seeing such horrible mutilation.
I pray you get relief, soon.
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Post by woodeye on Jul 3, 2023 16:18:01 GMT -6
Excellent video, heavyhitterokra. I was not aware of the difference between grasshoppers and locusts. It sure sounds like the swarms you have of those dreaded things are locusts.
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Post by amyinowasso on Jul 4, 2023 8:13:07 GMT -6
This makes me sad,so sorry!
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Post by rdback on Jul 4, 2023 9:48:02 GMT -6
Sorry heavyhitterokra, I just can't "like" your post. I really feel bad for you. I wish there was something I could do. Hang in there.
How long do these things hang around? Any chance you could focus on a "Fall" garden?
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 4, 2023 15:17:49 GMT -6
The last time I had grasshoppers like this, they lasted two seasons (2011-2012). They flew in on August 2nd, of 2011. I was in the garden the day they hit. It sounded like a hail storm when they began falling out of the sky and hitting my plastic. A wildfire during an extended drought drove them ahead of the smoke at that time. The fire burned out before it got here, but the grasshopper fallout was worse than the fire. (Things grow back after a fire, not so much after a grasshopper plague).
This time they moved in July 20th, 2022, also just ahead of a wildfire, during drought. So this is my second season from the 2022 infestation. The second season is worse than the first season because they were hatched in place.
In both 2011 and 2022, My plants had several months of growth before the grasshoppers hit, so I did get a partial harvest both of those years. The second season, they ate my plants before they matured.
I'd have to plant a Fall garden in July in order to beat the frost this coming October. July and August are the peak months of grasshopper activity.
We had our July 4th get-together here at the house on Sunday evening, because our extended families are so large that we share Holidays by spreading the get-togethers over several days. We just threw our watermelon rinds on the ground where our campgrounds are, down by the garden. I went out there the next day to pick up around the place and found that the grasshoppers had already eaten the watermelon rinds. There was nothing left to pick up except for tiny bits of green skin about 2" inches long. I wish I had taken my camera with me, for each scrap of rind was so covered in grasshoppers that it looked like a single, seething, mass of legs and wings, like maggots on a rotting corpse.
This is all that's left of my Baker Family Heirloom tomatoes.
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